I was cleaning up a storeroom and discovered three perfectly good, but obviously old, computers. Two are old 286s with one megabyte of memory each and the other is a 386 with two Mb of Ram. The 386 appears to have a 40-Mb hard disk but the 286s have only 20-Mb drives on them. I certainly have no use for these machines, but I am loath to throw something away that works fine. I'd rather just give them away to someone who can get some use out of it. I come from the United States, and know of at least two charity drives organised by a club in my home town that collected old PCs from people, fixed them up and then gave them to poor schools. Are any such efforts made here? It would be disgraceful if there weren't, and you should organise one. ROGER MEAD Clearwater Bay Frankly, I have not come across any concerted efforts to collect usable old computers with which to equip, say, needy children. And even an apparently wealthy territory such as Hong Kong has its fair share of these. Perhaps groups like the Hong Kong Computer Society have organised this sort of thing before and I have not been paying attention. If not, you are right, we should get something going. If any readers of this column have old PCs they want to get rid of or are interested in being involved in a project to revamp old PCs and give them away to, say, a needy school, feel free to write to me. The same goes for anyone who already may be involved in such activities. I have been pondering the pressure being put on consumers to upgrade hardware and software every couple of years. The compulsion to chuck out that perfectly serviceable old 286 would be considerably lessened, I thought, if it could be made Internet capable. So I have made a little study of just what can be done with a 286 and the Net. You can still find DOS versions of communications programs like Telix or Procomm with which you can dial up the Internet and check your e-mail with Pine. Admittedly 2,400-baud modems were about the fastest modems around when 286s were considered state-of-the art, but today even 14.4-Kbps modems are considered slow and can be had for a song. You can even browse the Web with a 286 and a 9,600-bps modem if you use text-based Lynx browser. And I have just discovered a proper graphical browser that would run perfectly well on a DOS machine. Called Arachne, this shareware browser was written by a Czech high-school dropout and can be downloaded off the Internet at http://www.naf.cz/arachne/ . It is a graphical Web browser for DOS compatible operating systems and needs an i8086 compatible CPU, 420 Kb (550 with PPP) of DOS memory and an SVGA or VESA video card. E-mail Larry Campbell or write to Technology Post, 28th floor, Dorset House, Taikoo Place, 979 King's Road, Quarry Bay. Fax: 2565-2624 or 2791-2478.
